Category: Culture
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Drowning In A Sea Of Schmucks
In Yiddish, according to Leo Rosten in his essential The Joys Of Yiddish, “schmuck” can mean three things: a penis, a fool or a son of a bitch. Looking around at the various problems pushing humanity to the precipice, I see plenty of penises, fools and SOBs. Plenty of schmucks. Hell, they’ve surrounded us as…
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Oh, To Be A Rich, White Sociopath!
Last night Elon Musk demonstrated (yet again) that not only is he a rich, white sociopath, he’s the poster boy for Rich, White Sociopaths! Elon The Rich, White Sociopath Even before he got to last night, Elon has consistently demonstrated a sociopath’s consistent disregard for right and wrong or the rights and feelings of others.…
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Is Winning An Election And CHEATING To Win Really The Same Thing?
Here in America, we’ve managed a remarkable piece of gymnastics. We’ve equated cheating to win election with not cheating to win election. Both are just “different ways to run”. In theory, democracy is a marketplace of ideas. The good ideas should, ultimately, succeed while the bad ones fail. The bad idea crowd (like the ones…
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Jews’ Refusal To Convert Is Antisemitism’s Root Cause
If you pore over history and histories searching for the root cause of antisemitism, you won’t find it. That’s a curious thing considering the answer’s so obvious. From their first entrance on the world stage, Jews have been outsiders to whatever cultures they lived beside. Take the Romans. They considered the Hebrews “outsiders”. What, from…
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What Leadership Looks Like – And What It DOESN’T
President Joe Biden just gave a master class in “How To Be A Leader”, and another in “How To Lead”. Circumstances in the Middle East are pitched at a full boil. Israel is a war zone yet Biden 1) kept to his diplomatic mission despite the fact that all the Arab sides canceled on him,…
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Where The Hell Does Antisemitism Come From Anyway?
Antisemitism has been called “history’s oldest hatred”. That’d be quite an honor if it wasn’t so deadly and (worse) so wrong-headed. From the moment Jews first appeared in the historical record, they set themselves apart from the other tribes with whom they lived. Antisemitism predates Christianity and Islam. The Greek and Roman worlds both viewed…
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Our News Media STILL Can’t Handle Donald Trump
I’ve no doubt that KRISTEN WELKER, newly appointed host of NBC’s creaky, tired, old MEET THE PRESS, is good at something. Journalism however ain’t it. Even when she was just a regular member of NBC News’ reporting corps, Kristen regularly demonstrated that she was a mediocre little girl trying to fill a skilled, grown woman’s…
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Confession: Sometimes, I Miss “Old Twitter”
I am a huge fan of Mastodon. I really enjoy the community I’ve found in the fediverse. I love what I’ve learned there about moss and mushrooms, El Greco and butterflies, this and that and pretty much everything in between. The big difference between the fediverse and a social media platform like, say, Twitter, is…